Tracy's Introduction

My name is Tracy Hoskin and I am working as the Gender Program Officer with FECORAH, a second tier agricultural cooperative in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Anna and I are both interns with the Canadian Cooperative Association and coincidentally were in the same program in university together. But, back to the main topic. My project with FECORAH is to bring credit, technical assistance and market access to the cooepratives we work with. Our specific project actually works with only three cooperatives at this point and we are trying to find at least 5 more to join. This is actually an interesting problem in itself and has taught us some of the pitfalls of the project. My role is new here with the intention of better integrating women into the project, in a variety of ways. The idea is that I will help conduct some gender sensitization, gender analysis and collect sex disaggregated data and build some institutional capacity within the board at FECORAH. As I have been discovering FECORAH is far behind some other organizations in including gender in their work. However, the situation of a women's coop movement in Honduras is also quite different than what is found in neighbouring central american countries for reasons I am still discovering.
I think that it is going to be a challenge in many ways, but I know that these are the problems that many "gender people" face in every country - Canada as well. Therefore, I am ready for the challenge and will just have to look for small changes.
Ai, I was also going to try and compile some resources for my organization so maybe we can help each other out if we come across any good training materials, articles, etc in Spanish and pass them on. Also, I understand about the language barrier and it will get easier I am sure!
Aside from work, it has been slightly hard at times to adapt to life here as the city is quite dangerous. I am not an overly cautious or paranoid person and haven't seen the real threat (I guess you never do) but have been fairly cautious about where I am going and was starting to feel a bit trapped and getting cabin fever. However, this weekend we got out watched the Honduras-Canada soccer game at a friend's house, went to the market, downtown, etc and was feeling more confident that I knew the city. Then this morning we learned that our landlord's daughter was robbed outside our house last night! We live in a very secure area so it was a bit of a reality check. It is such a hard balance to find. I am definitely living the upper middle class life here typical of a expat in my mind...which is not something I expected and at times is a bit strange because life is not much different than it was at home. With that said I hope that everyone is being safe but also enjoying all your cities have to offer.